The first few purchases would likely be unaffected until the buyer has a chance to form an evaluation of credibility. And even then, how much stock do people put into online reviews of any product or service? I tend to only look at reviews in aggregate, unless the specific reviewer has established credibility.

I hope that my occasional book reviews have established some sort of credibility with my ones of readers. I certainly try to make it clear when I might have a bias (e.g. disclosing stock ownership or a personal friendship). Mostly, though, I’m motivated to give accurate reviews in order to advance my own thought leadership. I’m very self-serving sometimes.

On the whole, I appreciate that Amazon is trying to keep reviews fully-disclosed. I just don’t think they’re doing it very well. If a reviewer has a relationship with the reviewee and it is properly disclosed, there’s no reason to suppress the review.

In his forthcoming book, Mike Ryan aims to introduce Amazon Web Services (AWS) to developers and systems administrators. Correctly creating and managing an AWS environment is a cross between development and administration, so anyone coming from a straight admin or dev background would probably miss key components.

Unfortunately, in aiming for two audiences, he produces a book that doesn’t seem to quite satisfy either. The book goes into a lot of unnecessary detail, for example a lot of Postgresql detail in the backup chapter, and a lot of Puppet specifics scattered throughout.

My biggest complaint is the way the book is organized. Basic AWS concepts like regions aren’t introduced in the beginning. Several concepts appear in passing before they are explained. EC2 security groups are lumped into the chapter at IAM roles, but it makes more sense to separate those.

Much of the book focuses on a single example, without a lot of discussion of other use cases. However, the use of auto scaling and Elastic Load Balancers in various cases is very well explained. The use and limitations of IAM roles is excellent as well.

This book could benefit from some reorganization and a more focused audience. With more information about AWS and less on implementation details for specific environments, the second edition could be a valuable resource.

Mark Burgess is one of the smartest people I know, and the thought of reading his books was always a little bit daunting. Would I be able to understand what he was trying to tell me? I can’t speak for the other books, but Thinking in Promises is a very approachable introduction to Promise Theory. Although the approach is often academic, Burgess does an excellent job of keeping the reader engaged through a variety of examples, humor, and stick figure drawings.

Promise theory came from the work of Burgess and others in developing the computer configuration management tool CFEngine. However, the theory itself is broadly applicable to a variety of interactions. Promise theory lies somewhere between the vagueness of management buzzwords and the strict formality of mathematical language.

Contrary to Western norms, Promise Theory works from the bottom up, describing the intended state without consideration of the steps to get there. Promises are made by agents instead of being imposed by an outside actor. Thus, Promise Theory requires autonomy, making it a more apt modeling framework for interactions that involve humans.

Thinking in Promises starts by explaining the fundamental concept of a promise, and how promises are made, accepted, and evaluated. Following chapters expand on these concepts individually. The final chapters discuss systems of promises, which often involve one or more layers of proxies.

Burgess does an excellent job of making the concepts understandable by both technical and non-technical readers. Each chapter concludes with thought exercises intended to guide the reader toward a greater understanding. Most of the examples used in the chapters focus on non-computer interactions like getting a taxi ride.

The book does not promise to change the way I view the world, and it might be hyperbolic for me to say it did. Nonetheless, Thinking in Promises gave me an interesting lens through which to view both computer and human interactions. I recommend it to anyone looking for a way to model systems.

Three years after Red Hat become the first open source company to reach a billion dollars in annual revenue, CEO Jim Whitehurst published a tell-all book about his company. The Open Organization barely mentions the technology involved in Red Hat’s success, although Whitehurst holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science. The Open Organization, as the title suggests, is about the organizational culture of Red Hat that enables its success.

Whitehurst describes his time at Red Hat as a learning experience that made him a better leader. Previously, he had been the successful Chief Operating Officer at Delta Airlines, guiding that company through bankruptcy and revival in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. The organizational structure of Delta is described as being “top down”, typical of most large companies.

Such a structure arises from an promotes risk aversion and central control. Red Hat prefers a bottom-up approach where employees are given a wide latitude to make decisions. The role of the CEO becomes motivator and context-setter, while accountability is handled by social pressure.

However, the bottom-up approach cannot be truly described as a democracy, a point that Whitehurst emphasizes repeatedly. Red Hat follows a “the best idea wins, no matter where it comes from” policy, but Whitehurst makes it clear that ideas have to be solicited, too. Employees have different preferences about communication, and they need different ways to provide their ideas.

In describing Red Hat’s culture across seven chapters, Whitehurst doesn’t prescribe the specifics to every other organization. In chapter 7, he acknowledges that Red Hat is still a work in progress. Nonetheless, the broader principles are applicable. Whitehurst cites examples from other companies across a variety of industries to demonstrate that it’s not only software companies that can follow Red Hat’s example.

The Open Organization is a well-written book that turns out to be an easy read. Unlike many management books, it focuses on practical effects instead of theory and provides numerous examples. The content is well laid out, establishing the “why” before moving on to the “what” and finally the “how”.

My main complaint is that Whitehurst does not address the potential criticisms of Red Hat’s method. The blunt and argumentative (although generally collegial) nature will not be appealing to everyone. Furthermore, the way the company aggressively defends its culture (a phenomenon described in several places) prevents whimsical change but it also could discourage appropriate changes from the outside.

Nevertheless, The Open Organization is an excellent book for leaders at any level of an organization. I strongly recommend it as a guide to opening up your own organization. Picking and chose what works for you.

The Open Organization is scheduled to be released on June 2. It is published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Three years ago this month, the city of Joplin, Missouri was devastated by an EF-5 tornado. Not only were numerous buildings destroyed, but 159 people lost their lives. This was the first 100-fatality tornado since 116 people died in a 1953 tornado in Flint, Michigan. As word of the impact spread, I can recall being thankful that my chasing range was limited to northern Illinois that day. Author Tamara Hart Heiner drove through the Joplin area in the days after the tornado and was struck by the extent of the devastation. After speaking with survivors, she decided to write her first non-fiction book. Tornado Warning, released earlier this month, tells the story of the tornado through the eyes of seven women who survived it.

The women of Tornado Warning led varied-but-normal lives before the storm. Normalcy would not survive the day. I found the early part of the book a little dull, which is to be expected. The women and their families were going through their usual Sunday routine. When the tornado hits, the book becomes positively riveting. One woman rides it out in a bathtub, covering her children with her body and a mattress. Another was in her van. That she and her son survived is nothing short of miraculous.

Heiner does not dwell on the tornado itself. Indeed, the narrative moves the tornado along quickly; like its real-life counterpart, it is here and gone within moments. Much of the book focuses on the hours immediately following the tornado when Joplin residents frantically search for loved ones, rescue their neighbors, and try to come to grips with the stark new reality.

Although scenes shift quickly from one protagonist to another, the reader gets a definite sense of each woman’s personality. The narration seems to take on some of the character of the woman being followed. The rapid shifts made it difficult to keep track of the characters initially, but it proved to be the appropriate style during and after the tornado.

In all, this is an excellent read. It showcases the human side of tornadoes that never seems to make it into IMAX films. The tornado preparedness and safety advice is invaluable and I encourage all readers to not skip it. Some of the meteorological discussion at the beginning of the book is painful (particularly “the jet stream is typically 300 millibars strong”), but this is not a story about meteorology. Heiner does an excellent job of capturing the humanity of the Joplin tornado, so I can forgive meteorological errors.

The net proceeds from Tornado Warning are being donated to Joplin recovery charities.

Shortly before I left for a conference in Washington, D.C., a friend told me that astronaut and Internet sensation Chris Hadfield would be signing his new book the day I arrived. I didn’t even know he had a book coming out, but I figured I shouldn’t turn down the opportunity to get an astronaut’s autograph, so I pre-ordered it. My impression of Colonel Hadfield was that he was a humble and genuine person.

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth reads the same way. Hadfield takes the reader through his life and career with a degree of humility only a Canadian could achieve. He tells the stories with such enthusiasm, as if he’s in awe of his entire life. The descriptions of views from space are particularly compelling, and the reader can easily place himself aboard the International Space Station.

One might not expect astronaut skills to be very applicable to daily life. However, as I read this book, I found myself drawing inspiration from his words. His focus on “working the problem” particularly resonated with me. I consider it no accident that the day after I finished the book I made a significant breakthrough on a problem that had been vexing me at work. Although the stakes are much higher for astronauts, we can all benefit from the astronaut way of thinking. Hadfield took great care to point out that being accepted into the astronaut corps did not make him an astronaut. Even a trip to space is not sufficient. Astronauthood comes from years of training, practice, failure, and — most importantly — developing the right mindset.

Hadfield’s advice, developed from years of surviving some of the most dangerous jobs on the planet, focuses on what seem to be negative thoughts: sweating the small stuff and “what’s the next thing that could kill me?” He does an excellent job of explaining how these negative thoughts lead to positive outcomes. The lessons are readily applicable to everyday life, even for the earthbound. This is a masterfully-written book. It is both entertaining and inspiring.

I recently learned Of Susan Crawford’s book Captive Audience when she was a guest on the “This Week in Law” podcast. In Captive Audience, Crawford examines the merger of Comcast and NBCUniversal. Crawford makes no attempt to hide her feelings on the nation’s largest cable provider getting (further) into the content business. The book is more of an advocacy journalism work than a dispassionate academic report. Comcast’s supporters may object to Crawford’s arguments, but her characterizations are refreshingly fair. She is quick to point out that the players are acting, not like evil madmen, but rational business actors pursuing their self-interests. Her main concern is that these interests do not line up with what she believes to be the public’s best interests.

Crawford does not blame Comcast CEO Brian Roberts for this disconnect, though his company has worked tirelessly to keep the status quo. The root of the problem is that the Internet industry is both unregulated and uncompetitive. Crawford rejects the notion that DSL, cellular, and satellite services are competitors to cable companies. DSL is too slow and satellite too high-latency for modern Internet applications and cellular, while convenient, is limited by lower bandwidth and small screen sizes.

The state of regulation for cable providers is like that of the early days of the rail road and electrical industries, which is to say non-existent. Cable providers lack the common carrier requirements imposed on the phone companies. As a result, Comcast and others are free to turn the Internet into a walled garden of curated channels, much like the current state of cable television. As dire of a picture as Crawford paints, it’s hard to see it as a likely threat. Plausible, certainly, but I don’t see it on the horizon.

Nevertheless, America clearly has an Internet problem. Our speeds and prices are worse than most of the developed world. In an age where high speed Internet access is increasingly important to social, academic, and economic activities, one third of Americans don’t subscribe to high speed Internet service. A strong correlation between non-subscribership and low socioeconomic status. If Internet connectivity is necessary for prosperity, expensive Internet prevents upward mobility.

Absent competitive pressure, the public interest can only be enforced by regulation. Interestingly, it was the Nixon administration that first sought to prevent monopolies in the cable industry. In recent years, Republicans and Democrats have proven equally unwilling to impose regulation on the industry. Municipal and private sector fiber installations seem to be the only near-term hope for keeping Comcast in check.

In short, I found Captive Audience to be an informative and compelling read. Crawford takes the reader through the history of monopolies in the United States and of the cable industry. She examines the technical and political reasons that Comcast became and remains a monopoly. In closing, Crawford looks at the effect that the Comcast/NBC merger had on AT&T’s failed attempt to purchase T-Mobile. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Internet policy.

Project management is an underrepresented genre in fiction. That it even exists is probably no small surprise to many, and probably of interest to even fewer. There is very little about project management that the average reader would find sexy or thrilling. Fortunately, Tom DeMarco makes no attempts at either (despite the occasional hint of a romantic undercurrent).

I wasn’t sure what to expect when my professor mentioned this book in class recently — perhaps a dashing project manager who sweeps through saving the day and buckling swashes at every opportunity. Instead, the reader is given Webster Tompkins, a competent and entirely normal project manager with years of experience and a looming layoff (or, in the words of Mr. Tompkins’ barely fictitious employer: “Released to Seek Opportunities Elsewhere”). While dozing in the back of an assembly, Tompkins is whisked off to the former Soviet state of Morovia. The Noble National Leader plans to turn his small country into the world leader in shrink-wrapped software, and Tompkins is just the man to lead the way.

What sets The Deadline apart as a novel is its entirely unconcealed intention to be a learning tool. The plot, exaggerated conditions and all, serves as a framework to present critical project management wisdom. Conveniently, Tompkins keeps a journal in which is writes these lessons as they occur, condensing the knowledge into bite-sized nuggets. What sets The Deadline apart as a learning tool is its readability. Although this book could readily be used in a formal project management course, it is interesting and well-written. Unlike the dialogue in project management scenarios given in textbooks (which, with apologies to Brewer and Dittman, is lousy), The Deadline reads like actual conversations had been transcribed. The end result is an informative and entertaining read that goes by far too quickly.

Perhaps the most striking thing about DeMarco’s novel is the publication date: 1997. At no time during my reading did I find myself thinking “boy, I’m sure glad that problem is solved now.” Although the nature of IT has changed in the decade and a half since The Deadline was written, the lessons are still very applicable. Especially when it comes to managing the human resources, it seems the lessons are still being relearned by each successive generation of managers (or sometimes not). Being a systems engineer and not a developer may slant my view of the current state, and it is entirely likely that software development managers have absorbed these lessons better. Until then, this book should required reading for every IT manager, project manager or otherwise.

I first heard of The Visible Ops Handbook during Ben Rockwood’s LISA ’11 keynote. Since Ben seemed so excited about it, I added it to the list of books I should (but probably would never) read. Then Matt Simmons mentioned it in a brief blog post and I decided that if I was ever going to get around to reading it, I needed to stop putting it off. I bought it that afternoon, and a month later I’ve finally had a chance to read it and write a review. Given the short length and high quality of this book, it’s hard to justify such a delay.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) training has been a major push in my organization the past few years. ITIL is a formalized framework for IT service management, but seems to be unfavored in the sysadmin community. After sitting through the foundational training, my opinion was of the “it sounds good, but…” variety. The problem with ITIL training and the official documentation is that you’re told what to do without ever being told how to do it. Kevin Behr, Gene Kim, and George Spafford solve that problem in less than 100 pages.

Based on observations and research of high-performing IT teams, The Visible Ops Handbook assumes that no ITIL practices are being followed. Implementation of the ITIL basics is broken down into four phases. Each phase includes real-world accounts, the benefits, and likely resistance points. This arms the reader with the tools necessary to sell the idea to management and sysadmins alike.

The introduction addresses a very important truism: “Something must need improvement, otherwise why read this?” The authors present a general recap of their findings, including these compelling statistics: 80% of outages are self-inflicted and 80% of mean time to repair (MTTR) is often wasted on non-productive activities (e.g. trying to figure out what changed).

Phase 1 focuses on “stabilizing the patient.” The goal is to reduce unplanned work from 80% of outage time to 25% or less. To do this, triage the most critical systems that generate the most unplanned work. Control when and how changes are made and fence off the systems to prevent unauthorized changes. While exceptions might be tempting, they should be avoided. The authors state that “all high performing IT organizations have only one acceptable number of unauthorized changes: zero.”

After reading Phase 1, I already had an idea to suggest. My group handles change management fairly well, but we don’t track requests for change (RFCs) well. Realizing how important that is, I convinced our groups manager and our best developer that it was a key feature to add to our configuration management database (CMDB) system.

In Phase 2, the reader performs a catch & release program and find “fragile artifacts.” Fragile infrastructure are those systems or services with a low change success rate and high MTTR. After all systems have been “bagged and tagged”, it’s time to make a CMDB and a service catalog. This phase is the next place that my group needs to do work. We have a pretty nice CMDB that’s integrated with our monitoring systems and our job schedulers, but we lack a service catalog. Users can look at the website and see what we offer, but that’s only a subset of the services we run.

Phase 3 focuses on creating a repeatable build library. The best IT organizations make infrastructure easier to build than repair. A definitive software library, containing master images for all software necessary to rebuild systems, is critical. For larger groups, forming a separate release management team to engineer repeatable builds for the different services is helpful. The release management team should be separate from the operational group and consist of generally senior staff.

The final phase discusses continual improvement. If everyone stopped at “best practices”, no one would have a competitive advantage. Suggested metrics for each key process area are listed and explained. After all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Finding out what areas are the worst makes it easier to decide what to improve upon.

The last third of the book consists of appendices that serve as useful references for the four phases. One of the appendices includes a suggested table layout for a CMDB system. The whole book is focused on the practical nature of ITIL implementation and guiding organizational learning. At times, it assumes a large staff (especially when discussing separation of duties), so some of the ideas will have to be adapted to meet the needs of smaller groups. Nonetheless, this book is an invaluable resource to anyone involve in IT operations.

It came as a bit of a surprise that there’s an entire series of mystery novels set at the University of Notre Dame. It came as a great surprise that these novels were written by a long-serving member of the Notre Dame faculty. The Green Revolution is the 12th Notre Dame mystery novel written by Ralph McInerny, and one of over forty mystery novels he has printed. As a loyal Boilermaker, I found the basis of this novel to be most pleasing. The Green Revolution takes place during the 2007 football season, one in which Notre Dame did not have net positive rushing yards until the third game of the season. As the season progresses, more and more Notre Dame fans begin calling for the ouster of the football coach, and some faculty move to end the football program entirely.

The apparent murder of one of the coach’s harshest critics is the purported theme of the book, but McInerny seems to spend a good portion of the novel discussing Notre Dame for Notre Dame’s sake. Certainly there are some references that would only be understood by persons more familiar with the institution than I. As a mystery novel, though, it works quite well. The identity of the killer remained unknown to me until the very end, but looking back, it all made sense. The writing style was enjoyable, even when the references were beyond me. No doubt I will pick up another McInerny book the next time I’m in the mood for a mystery.